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Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Qatar’s World Cup: Looking for the Smoking Gun

Qatar’s handling of persistent suspicion that it illicitly
employed its financial muscle to win the right to host the 2022 World Cup has
earned it a conviction in the court of public opinion even if revelations of
alleged bribery have yet to produce a smoking gun.

Qatar’s refusal to provide transparency and accountability
about its World Cup bid, including details of its budget and the way that
budget was spent as well as its relationship to disgraced former FIFA vice
president and Asian Football Confederation (AFC) president Mohammed Bin Hammam,
a Qatari national, has only served to cement a public conviction that the Gulf
state has much to hide.

Qatar’s Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy, the
body responsible for organizing the World Cup, issued this week a bland
response to a report in Britain’s The Sunday Times asserting that it had
obtained millions of documents proving bribery by Mr. Bin Hammam on behalf of
the Qatari bid of African soccer officials who mostly are not members of FIFA’s
executive committee who vote on the awarding of World Cup hosting rights.

The brief statement simply denied any wrongdoing or
relationship with Mr. Bin Hammam who in 2012 was banned by FIFA for life from
involvement in professional soccer on charges of conflict of interest in his
management of the AFC’s financial and commercial affairs.

Like earlier generic denials of wrongdoing, the statement
failed to convince the court of public opinion of Qatari innocence even though
much of the suspicion stems from repeated controversy about the Gulf state’s
bid and deep-seated distrust of global governance of soccer that has been
wracked in the past four years by the worst corruption crisis in the 109-year
history of FIFA. Mr. Bin Hammam was a central figure in those scandals.

The suspicion was also fuelled by the fact that Qatar
invested a multiple of what its competitors, including the United States, South
Korea and Australia, were willing to spend on their World Cup bids. Qatar’s
massive spending generated envy and sour grapes despite the fact that FIFA
bidding rules do not set a ceiling on expenditure for World Cup bids.

Qatar’s failure to engage in the debate in a substantive way
much as it engaged with human rights and labour activists who denounced
abominable living and working conditions of foreign workers in the Gulf state
has not only earned it a conviction in the court of public opinion but also
undermined the goal it hoped to achieve with massive spending on sports and the
World Cup.

For Qatar, sports in general and soccer in particular is a
means of building soft and subtle power – the kind of empathy in the
international community and in public opinion that would persuade its friends
to come to its aid in times of need like they did for Kuwait after it was
invaded in 1990 by Iraq.

Qatar sees soft power as a compensation for the fact that it
is tiny and has too small a population to build the kind of hard military power
it would need to defend itself without international assistance. Being
identified in the public mind with bribery and slavery, the term used by labour
activists for labour conditions in the Gulf state, does not engender empathy.

If Qatar has all but lost its case in the court of public
opinion, it has done little to counter questions left unanswered by The Sunday
Times revelations. Those revelations appear to provide further documentation of
partly previously disclosed corruption and conflict of interest in the
governance of world soccer as well as of Mr. Bin Hammam’s dubious financial
dealings and management of both the AFC and FIFA’s soccer development Goal
Programme that is designed to fund projects of the group’s member associations.

The Sunday Times asserts that multiple payments it has
documented are related to the Qatari bid, some of which were already referenced
in an internal audit of the AFC’s finances two years ago that provided the
grist for Mr. Bin Hammam’s downfall. That is not always immediately clear from
extracts it has published nor it clear that the Qatari’s beneficiaries had the
clout or authority to dictate the votes of FIFA executive committee members.

Extracts of emails published by the British paper do appear
to establish a relationship between Mr. Bin Hammam and the Qatari bid
committee. In some cases, the effort to influence the vote in favour of Qatar
seems plausible. Those cases include the bribing and wooing of mostly non-FIFA
executive committee member African soccer officials who are alleged to have influenced
the vote Africa’s representatives on the committee as well as Mr. Bin Hammam’s
funding of legal expenses of a disgraced member from Oceania who refused to
vacate his committee seat so that he could cast his vote in favour of the Gulf
state. Qatar’s funding of the costs of a congress of the Confederation of
African Football (CAF) in which Qatar was the only bidder allowed to present
its case for hosting the 2022 tournament seems equally evident.

Nevertheless, one still will have to prove that the African
soccer officials were in a position and succeeded in dictating the votes of
African members of the FIFA executive committee. The statutes of the
Confederation of African Football (CAF) do not suggest that its FIFA executive
committee members are obliged to follow CAF instructions. The statutes vaguely
state that the president of CAF, who is automatically a vice president of FIFA
will “make sure that the African representatives elected and/or appointed to
the FIFA Executive Committee fulfil their duties in a spirit of African
solidarity.” CAF president Issa Hayatou was one of the beneficiaries of Mr. Bin
Hammam’s largesse.

At the same time, the purpose of other payments disclosed by
The Sunday Times may have been related to Mr. Bin Hammam’s bid to challenge
FIFA president Sepp Blatter in the group’s 2011 presidential election. Mr. Bin
Hammam was forced to withdraw his candidacy after he was initially suspended by
FIFA on charges of trying to buy the votes of Caribbean soccer officials. While
some of the emails from African officials who benefitted from Mr. Bin Hammam’s funding
make explicit reference to Qatar’s World Cup bid, others appear to be
supportive of Mr. Bin Hammam himself at a time that he was preparing for his
attempt to wrest the FIFA presidency from Mr. Blatter.

The distinction between Qatar’s World Cup and Mr. Bin
Hammam’s presidential bid is further blurred by The Sunday Times’ report that
the self-made multi-millionaire used slush funds controlled by his company
rather than by either the Qatari committee, FIFA or the AFC. The issue becomes
even murkier when one takes into account that Mr. Bin Hammam is alleged to have
been Mr. Blatter’s bag man in earlier FIFA presidential elections when Qatar
supported the incumbent FIFA president.

Qatari officials have repeatedly suggested that they were
opposed to Mr. Bin Hammam’s candidacy because they feared that Qatar’s winning
of the hosting rights coupled with control of FIFA might be too much for the
global soccer community to accept. The officials however never provided
evidence of their assertion.

If Qatar is in the hot seat, FIFA appears about to join it.
Independent FIFA investigator Michael Garcia has suggested that he will not take
The Sunday Times files into consideration in drawing conclusions from his investigation.
In doing so, he is doing neither a favour to Qatar or to FIFA. On the assumption
of innocent until proven guilty, it is Qatar’s interest to have its name
cleared beyond doubt. In FIFA’s case, Mr. Garcia’s decision reinforces a
widespread impression that the group is run by an old-boy network that
unsuccessfully tries to maintain a façade of transparency and accountability but
in effect is determined to preserve its old ways which over the last four years
have produced one scandal after the other.

James M. Dorsey is a Senior Fellow at the S.
Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological
University. He is also co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute
for Fan Culture, and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East
Soccer blog and a forthcoming book with the same
title.

4 comments:

If there is corruption surrounding the selection of world cup hosts, then why isn't Russia being investigated. Are they not equally mired in controversy? Reason being is that Russia supplies gas to the UK and they don't want the lifeline cut off. Absolute hypocrisy.

At the end of the day, I'd be very surprised if the world cup is taken away from Qatar - however much the media protests. Might get moved to winter that's all. There's far too much riding politically all round.

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About Me

James M DorseyWelcome to The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer by James M. Dorsey, a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. Soccer in the Middle East and North Africa is played as much on as off the pitch. Stadiums are a symbol of the battle for political freedom; economic opportunity; ethnic, religious and national identity; and gender rights. Alongside the mosque, the stadium was until the Arab revolt erupted in late 2010 the only alternative public space for venting pent-up anger and frustration. It was the training ground in countries like Egypt and Tunisia where militant fans prepared for a day in which their organization and street battle experience would serve them in the showdown with autocratic rulers. Soccer has its own unique thrill – a high-stakes game of cat and mouse between militants and security forces and a struggle for a trophy grander than the FIFA World Cup: the future of a region. This blog explores the role of soccer at a time of transition from autocratic rule to a more open society. It also features James’s daily political comment on the region’s developments. Contact: incoherentblog@gmail.comView my complete profile